Teaching Tray Tuesday

This is one of the kids' favorites. They both love to play with cars- working, arranging, driving, etc. Throw in rice and suddenly it's wonderful! They scoop, plow, dig, make roads, etc. Have a dustbuster or kid-size dustpan available at the end to help with clean up :)

This is a very simple activity, but surprisingly soothing. All you need is an empty creamer container and popsicle sticks. The kids pop the lid open and drop them in, then dump. You can also store the sticks in the container and make it portable. Great restaurant entertainment for an antsy toddler :)

This has been a really neat activity for all of us. Carter loves his map skills workbooks and one day while we were working on 'perspective' I thought of trying this. (I also just love playing with these and wanted something to do with them :) I bought 2 packs of acrylic cubes (they sell them with the flower decorating supplies). Then I made puzzle cards from cut-out paper squares. The cards range from basic to more difficult. The kids have to copy the image (learning to convert from two-dimensional to three-dimensional). For Carter we also work on perspective, translating both literally and from an overhead ("map") view.